Five Tips for Starting (and Maintaining) Your Meditation Routine
I have been meditating for over 20 years. I credit meditation for helping me through a lot in life. But it hasn’t always been easy. In many ways, it’s like having a healthy diet. Or going to the gym or on runs. It is something I know is good for me, but it is also something that gets pushed to the side when life gets busy. So how do I
Developing a Meditation Practice: Loving-Kindness Meditation
In my last post I wrote about developing a basic mindfulness practice. Here I will tell you about a second practice. This one is also easy. And it is also very powerful. This one is loving-kindness. The Buddha taught this practice over 2500 years ago. In recent decades it has been reformulated by many teachers. These have been Buddhists and non-Buddhists. The reason so many teachers offer this meditation is
Missoula is Changing
Is it just me, or is Missoula changing? It used to be that I couldn’t go somewhere without recognizing some of my friends. I couldn’t drive down the street without seeing someone I knew! And now – it’s like we have experienced some advanced time warp. Yes, because of Covid-19 we have this migration influx in a super short period of time. Usually, such migrations take at least a decade.
Developing a Meditation Practice: Mindfulness of Breathing
When I was 20 years old, I learned to meditate. I was a typical stressed-out, anxious college student at the time. In fact, I had been diagnosed with depressive and generalized anxiety disorders in my teens and had been treating them with a variety of prescription drugs and therapies. Both the prescriptions and therapy were great in different ways. They got me out of the worst psychological darkness and helped
The Loneliness Crisis
Ten years ago, the BBC announced that loneliness was a “hidden killer” of the UK’s elderly. Last year, the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, connected the coronavirus pandemic with a loneliness epidemic in America. And this year, it has been clear that we are in a global loneliness crisis. What is loneliness? Psychologists define loneliness as a state of distress or discomfort caused by a lack of connection with others.
Avoiding or Overcoming Our Perfectionism
Are you a perfectionist? Even if you are far from perfect in any way, this personality trait might be running your life. And by running your life, it is probably ruining it as well. Perfection is not about becoming perfect. It is about looking perfect. And the distance between these two can be enormous. “To err is Human; to forgive, divine.” Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) was on to something